Skip to Content

Search: {{$root.lsaSearchQuery.q}}, Page {{$root.page}}

CCS Noon Lecture Series. "Use the Bottom to Squeeze the Middle: How to Understand Social Policy in Contemporary China:

Tuesday, February 25, 2014
12:00 AM
SSWB/International Institute-Room 1636

This talk examines how the Chinese government has developed strategies to enhance its capacity to govern despite the lack of democratic mechanisms that provide feedback and bottom-up evaluation. In the arena of labor and social policies, the government has combined high standards with extensive publicity and education, which encourages social mobilization around newly granted rights and entitlements. A key question in the future is whether the government can manage the rising expectations that accompany social mobilization.

Mary Gallagher is an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan where she is also the director of the Center for Chinese Studies. She is also a faculty associate at the Center for Comparative Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research. From 2012-2013, she was a visiting scholar at the Koguan Law School at Shanghai Jiaotong University.

Professor Gallagher received her Ph.D in politics in 2001 from Princeton University and her B.A. from Smith College in 1991. She was a foreign student in China in 1989 at Nanjing University. She also taught at the Foreign Affairs College in Beijing from 1996-1997. She was a Fulbright Research Scholar from 2003 to 2004 at East China University of Politics and Law in Shanghai, China where she worked on her current project, The Rule of Law in China: If They Build It, Who Will Come? This project examines the legal mobilization of Chinese workers. It was funded by the Fulbright Association and the National Science Foundation.

Her book Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China was published by Princeton University Press in 2005. She has published articles in World Politics, Law and Society Review, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Asian Survey. She is the co-editor of several new volumes on Chinese law and politics, including Chinese Justice: Civil Dispute Resolution in Contemporary China (Cambridge 2011) and From Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization: Markets, Workers, and the State in a Changing China (Cornell 2011).

Speaker: